Pinkie representing pan makes sense. Her balloon cutie mark is the pan flag.

Twilight’s mane is the bi flag. Yet she’s shoehorned into ace in this meme.

Rarity is the graytones with purple of an ace flag.

Dash is the rainbow flag.

AJ is the red/orange/yellow of the lesbian flag.

Fluttershy is also a pony, but not a pride flag. Maybe she’s just supposed to be straight. I’ve seen her pink and yellow shoehorned into the purple and yellow intersex flag back when futashy memes were big.

The spa twins are the trans flag.

I’ve thought of this as well.

Git is a great version control and distributed collaboration system.

Just need to use it to manage a constitution, a bill of rights, and a legal framework. Legal code instead of computer code.

Technologically super easy. Convincing a government to switch to a new constitution is hard. We just need an amendment that amends the amendment process into a pull request approval.

In his manifesto, Mangione suggested the health insurance industry had “gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it.” He could just as easily have been describing the national security state.

That’s why you befriend them instead of scaring them away.

Until the fact that you befriended them gets you fired because it scares your coworkers.

It’s preparation.

Now that human craft have finally made it back to the moon for the first time in decades, human beings and development are set to follow.

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That’s why the congestion pricing revenues ought to be spent on improving public transit, to maintain the tourist economy.

I agree with your final sentence applied to any corporate-owned website operating for profit, as long as you remove the word “developing”.

The solution isn’t to ban kids, it’s to ban the toxic sites, practices, and incentive structures.

I’m also talking about 15-20 years ago.

The influences I had were furries (queers), science/scifi nerds, academics, service members of the military who were otherwise separated from community, etc. The internet brought us together.

It was that or rural Florida where if you went outside and got stabbed by one of those poison palm you’d just get told that those have to be there because they kept the slaves from escaping the circus in the good old days.

What you’re talking about with kids today is what I mean about them being canaries.

I disagree with this point.

I used the internet extensively as a minor to socialize and find friends and to be exposed to viewpoints different from those of my peers. If I only had my peers to socialize with, things would have been much worse off for me. I found kind and supportive influences as a minor that kept me away from the hate/conservatism/fascism that many of my classmates descended into. I learned about the world and gained skills that made me a more well-rounded person. I even met up in person with thousands of strangers and had a grand time.

I see the gatekeeping of minors from internet spaces and worry about the impact that would have had on me and my development as a young person. If I hadn’t been welcomed as a minor online, I would not have been welcomed anywhere.

That said, I stayed the hell away from corporate spyware like facebook and twitter that only serve to reinforce existing problematic systems, expose people to the toxic IRL social environments that they may otherwise be trying to escape, and amplify the kind of hatred and bigotry that I personally was evading.

I miss the old internet where kids were safe. I don’t think that the solution is to ban kids; the solution is to ban platforms and profiteering incentive structures that create unsafe environments. The kids are the canaries in a coal mine. If the canary isn’t doing well, you don’t just ban it and keep digging: you get the hell out and find somewhere else to be.

Simple.

He’ll raise grocery prices via tariffs, and exacerbate immigration via a refugee crisis caused by wars.

I’d still want the auto mechanic to tell me what’s wrong with the transmission and how they diagnosed it. It’s true that I’d expect them to know what tests to run for the diagnosis due to their experience/training, but I still want to know what they discovered and how in order to better understand what’s going on with the vehicle and whether they are giving me a fair price for the repair.

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I have to disagree.

If you tell people to trust authorities about climate change instead of fostering critical thought and understanding, who is to say that their authorities will align with yours?

Your assertion is a recipe for pushing people to believe misinformation because they feel that they can trust their pastor or their employer or the guy on the news more than some nerd.

This was on the door to my office before my life ended in 2018.

Thank you for making me remember and cry.

Yeah. Medical and science denialism is a big problem. It gets fed when medicine and science are presented as absolutes with no room for debate or discussion, just blind fealty to experts. As a trained scientist who has worked professionally as a scientist for 12 years, I don’t trust several disciplines because they project this attitude. I don’t blame anyone for being skeptical of those who ask for blind trust in authority.

I was unfortunately very separated from society from 2018-2023, so I’m reliant on written records and memes to understand how others responded to it. As someone who missed it, I really get the impression that it was mostly the wealthy who freaked out, either from trying to process that our society’s medical infrastructure is shit, or from being sociopaths who were selfishly upset that their workers wanted time off.

After thinking about these a bit more, especially The Lancet article, I have a hypothesis.

For wealthy neoliberal elites, COVID was babby’s first trauma, so they overestimate how badly it impacted the average worker. It was so much worse than anything that had happened in their privileged lives up to that point that by comparison it was a world-altering traumatic event that changed everything.

Working people are used to surviving hardships (especially medical hardships) while those in power ignore them. COVID and the Trump administration’s lack of response was just business as usual. Compared to other widespread diseases that get routinely ignored and for which poor people routinely get denied care, COVID was minor (albeit more infectious) and easily forgettable.

That’s my best guess for why the libshits can’t grok why the little people reacted with such indifference while they lost their fucking minds.